Find curated lists of Twitter accounts in the areas you want to target. These lists should include influencers in your space, and well as potential customers/users. You can also look to follow the followers of your competition, but this can be messy if not done manually, as many of their followers are likely not relevant.

Using the Twitter Follower tool, follow all accounts on these pages by hitting the ‘Follow All’ button that should be in the upper right corner of any Twitter page (while logged in). It’s important to only add a few hundred each day – and you can always manually add them for additional targeting.

When your ‘following’ count starts to outweigh your follower count by more than 300, you’ll want to unfollow those that haven’t followed you back. To do this, start by suspending the ‘following’ process for a few days. Tweet as you normally would during that time, and spend some time liking and retweeting the relevant/interesting content from the people that you follow.

After a few days of normal activity, use a tool like Manage Flitter to unfollow those that haven’t followed you back. You can also unfollow by other criteria, like inactivity, spam, etc.

Once done, go back to step 2 and repeat the process.

There’s no shortage of Twitter tricks, hacks and tools, but this method has been proven to grow targeted and engaged Twitter profiles.

More Twitter Tricks

When sharing content that has been published on other sites, use a tool like http://startafire.com to overlay your brand and content on the shared link.

When creating content on your own blog or on 3rd party sites, create ‘tweetable’ snippets within the post for easy sharing on Twitter. See #4 on this list.

One more tool to consider: Followerwonk lets you analyze your Twitter account as well as your competitors’ accounts so that you can optimize your marketing strategy accordingly.